4-year-old booted after threats made in class

Kyle reached his limit about the time his pillow was taken away.

Unable to sleep during nap time, and made to step into the hallway until he could stop crying, the cranky 4-year-old lashed out in a classroom at The Family Development Center at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

"I am going to go shoot all my friends!" he said, according to a written account that the day care center provided the boy's parents after the July 22 tantrum.

What came next - after a day care worker talked to Kyle about appropriate language, eliciting an apology - was an investigation that sent university police to question Kyle's parents and ended with the boy's dismissal from the day care center he had attended for the past three years.

"The officers wanted to know if we had any guns," said Alice Hudson, his mother. "We don't."

Hudson, a clinician at a mental health center who doesn't allow her son to watch television or play with toy guns, said she believes Kyle got caught up in the same "zero tolerance" policy that schools and colleges across the country began applying after shootings like the one at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Va.

Similar episodes have drawn headlines across the country, including one in which a 9-year-old boy from Grand Junction was suspended in 2007 after bringing a toy gun to school.

"This whole thing has been handled very unreasonably," Hudson said. "I can see a universal policy for 19- and 20-year-olds who make statements like that. But to see it applied to a 4-year-old - I think you should at least acknowledge that they have different concepts of these kinds of things."

University officials deny that a zero-tolerance policy was behind the decision to dismiss Hudson's son.

According to Susan Szpyrka, the associate vice chancellor at UCCS, workers at the day care center have issued 45 incident reports involving Kyle over the past three years. Most detailed disciplinary problems, and seven were judged to be "significant," she said, though she declined to provide specifics.

Under day care policy, children can be expelled for behavior that undermines the "safe and positive learning environment," including hitting, pinching, spitting and other bad behavior.

Kyle displayed "a pattern of behavior that wasn't complementary to the day care center's mission," Szpyrka said.

Five other children have been expelled from the day care in the past year for behavioral problems, she said. The Family Development Center cares for about 130 children a day, some of them on a part-time basis.

Hudson, who said she discussed each complaint with her son, said last week was the first time the day care center had reported a threat of violence.

The other complaints were from squabbles involving scratching, pushing and hitting during quarrels over toys, sometimes when her son was the victim, she said. The day care center also sent home complaints that he had trouble staying still during nap time and that he sometimes ran instead of walked, she said.

With his viewing limited to Disney movies and a few preapproved "superhero" movies, Hudson said she doesn't know where her son picked up the language of gunplay. But she moved quickly to explain it's not appropriate, she said.

"He knows he said something he shouldn't have," she said. "We sat down and talked about how ... it's OK to be mad, but it's not OK to hurt people when you're angry."

With an ever-growing media environment saturated with violent images, it's common for children Kyle's age to pick up troubling ideas, no matter what lengths parents go to to protect them, child psychologists in Colorado Springs said Wednesday. Parents should focus on helping their children communicate their feelings, they said.

"Parents have no control over what their kids are exposed to once they're let out into society," said Dr. Suzanne Martin. "They can say, ‘That's not appropriate. But it is appropriate to tell us that you're mad, and let's figure out what you're mad about and how to deal with that.'"

contact the writer: 636-0366 or lance.benzel@gazette.com